[NASA]
In the beginning, God created everything with the potentiality for absolute usefulness according to the eternal ends of His Vision. This, our Creator’s Vision, is that which illuminates what will be hereafter referred to as the divinely authored Story of Creation, a story that according to our Creator’s original intention is an eternal story with a commencement but no conclusion. Since God is the Author of all existence, it is fitting to call this world His creation, and the unfolding of the happenings of this world as they unfold in accordance with His providential will His Story. This is to say that the proper unfolding of this world, is like a story, His story, the one that He wrote even before He made the world. Thus, all that He created to be part of this Eternal Story was originally ordained for perpetual usefulness, so that everything He brought into existence would carry out its preordained part that belongs to His eternal story for creation. When these parts unfold in accordance with His Vision or His plan, it brings Him joy. Like a father pleased with his children when they obey him and accomplish what he sets out for them to do, so is God proud of His creation when it brings to fruition the ends of His Vision for Creation. His original intention was that every created piece would have a specific place within His blueprint for creation and that each one would fit in such perfect and complementary relations with all other pieces within this harmonious manifold. Such obedience of all parts bears witness to His great mastery and sends up to Him an aroma of glory most sweet to Him.
All that our Heavenly Father created was originally intended to magnify Him through abiding in His will, because when the plans He has for creation come to fruition, they bear witness to His absolute perfection and absolute goodness. When we, His creation, abide in His will, we bring glory to our Heavenly Father and in a sense make Him rejoice over us like a proud father. Creation also glorifies God like how a piece of art glorifies the artist that made it. Consider every curve that Michelangelo chiseled in the marble slab and how the product of these masterful strokes would serve to bring glory to him who was the artist. The stone slab that would transform into a grand piece of art work echoes its creator’s magnificence. As each chiseled indentation collectively became the ends of Michelangelo’s Vision, they formed a harmonious manifold that is the form of one of his masterpieces, “David.” The craftsman had masterfully revealed out from the stone slab the beauty hidden within it for through his inner vision he saw the hidden form of David and sought through each stroke to bring this invisible form to increasing levels of visible manifestation. Thus, each of these strokes brought glory to the artist as they bore witness to his ingenious vision, and taken together they serve as a complete exposition of the ingeniousness of this visionary. In a similar way, what is created brings glory to its Creator by bearing witness to the Creator’s vision that authored it with all of His designs, intentions, and aspirations. Just as each chiseled curve was intended to reflect the beautifully good realities of the artist’s vision, a created reality reflects the beautiful realities of how good our Creator is by participating in the ends of His Vision. Each aspect, characteristic, and uniqueness comes together to harmoniously lift up a living testimony to the character and excellence of our Creator.
Now a defectively chiseled curve would have left a blemish on Michelangelo’s goodness as a craftsman and take away from the finished product’s intended beauty and majesty. Therefore, in a similar way, a created reality that fails to have eternal worth would have lacked goodness and beauty due to its transience. It would thereby suggest a possible shortcoming of the Creator and the goodness of His will. Such a temporal created reality would, along with its effects, ultimately fade into nothingness, because it would not endure into eternity for the Creator will not allow it. It is later however, when we will see that regardless of our failings as a rebellious race to fulfill His originally intended purpose for us, our Creator continually remains just, merciful, and perfect. We will see how even in spite of our waywardness, His loyal love endures for those who were created to be His children. He proves to be evermore truer and evermore faithful.
It was our Creator’s original intention that we would exist to be His children, for He longed to have a relationship with entities capable of engaging in a cooperative, interactive, and conscious relational association. However, this longing is not a necessary one, because His existence is not at all dependent on such associations as these. Now in order to satiate His unnecessary yearning, He formed and shaped our human existence to possess an intimate correspondence with the very image of His Godness. Such a resemblance pertains to the immaterial essence of human existence that gives rise to our unique capacity to be free moral and civil agents, capable of possessing a self-consciousness ego by being made aware of our own existence as well as our existence’s relation to external objects, and having the ability to form subjective associations and inclinations stimulated by an autonomous will unbounded by instinct or compulsion. He endowed us with such existential freedom so we can effectively serve in a centrally proactive role in the Eternal Story of Creation. This role is one that revolves around our pre-destined position as the stewards of creation, which is a position that entails the responsibility to see to it that what is made subject to us continually remains as it ought to be according to the Creator’s Vision and thereby ensuring that it perpetually glorifies the Creator. This agency of stewardship required that we would possess the capacity to rationally manage, to think creatively, form bonds of commitment and devotion, and to have subjective compassionate feelings...
The primacy of human existence arises from the relation that we not only have with the rest of creation but also the unique relationship we have with the Creator. Though such a primacy exists, its meaning and purpose refuses to allow for the exaltation and deification of human existence, for although we are the most vital creation of God, we exist to serve each and every other person, as well as all of creation even the most seemingly insignificant created entity as part of our position as the stewards of creation. Whereas the rest of creation can only bear witness to the impersonal attributes, power, and nature of our Creator, we exclusively have the unmerited privilege of bearing witness to the personal attributes and character of the Creator, as well as His perception of creation. Thus, our human perspective on creation is able to come into sync with the Creator’s Vision to a certain extent as is possible for finite creatures. Now this primacy of human existence is not intrinsic due to our superiority over the rest of creation, but due to our Heavenly Father’s design and aspiration that we are to be His children as we practice stewardship over our Father’s creation. In view of such a prominent responsibility before the Creator of all things, the relational covenant between our Creator and us is the most central element in the unfolding of the Story of Creation.
Before He laid the foundations of the finite cosmos, our Creator authored His eternal plans and purposes for creation as well as preordained all the tasks assigned to those who would serve as His stewards over all that He created. We were to participate in the most intimate oneness with Him among all that He created. In order to outfit our existence and have the capacities necessary to carry out the roles of those who could be rightly called the children of God. In accordance with His original aspiration for human existence it was necessary for our condition of existing and mode of existing to be made in the likeness of His own. This essentially concerns the immaterial aspects of human existence that cannot be deduced down to chemical reactions and the firing of neurons. This is to say that human existence is more than the sum of the biological happenings that transpire through the course of human existence, which are often merely corollaries or side effects associated with the immaterial happenings of the soul. This immaterial essence of human existence can be referred to as the soul, which is the substance of human identity and selfhood.
The Creator equipped our souls with the divine-like faculties necessary to attain a level of existing that included a category of willingness and inwardness that unfold through the synthesized functions and activities of the two major components of our soul, the mind and the heart. A psychological breakdown and analysis of the category of willingness and inwardness is a daunting and extensive task, and so consequently, it will have to be set aside for another text. For the purposes of this chapter it will be adequate to say that our Creator conjoined to the immaterial essence of human existence a spiritual dimension to be incorporated into our soulish consciousness and the immaterial operations revolving around this consciousness. Such a spiritual dimension of human existence allows for us to be entities capable of receiving the requisite divine aid from an immaterial divine “vertical” [that is a vertical dimension that connects a finite entity to an infinite entity through an intermediary] source necessary to carry out the duties and relational associations from the beginning to comprise our destiny within the Story of Creation. It was particularly necessary for us to not only have the ability to intelligently rationalize whether analytically, synthetically, or dialectically, but to also form existential relations revolving around the essence of love that are neither purely cognitive or chemical. Though we must strive to love as God loves and think as God thinks, these are not as important as being holy as God is holy, for loving and thinking are aspects of holiness.
Our Creator created us to have a relationship with Him, yet not by rational calculations, but out of His willful desire to engage in interactive fellowship with us. So then, we are molded into the likeness of Himself to the highest degree among all of His creation, for we were created to be His children, a testament of His creative power and a physical witness of His heart. Our Heavenly Father willed for this relationship not out of a desire based in necessity, but out of a desire, an inclination and aspiration from the deepest parts of His heart. His aspirations stemmed from the synthetic operation of His mind and heart while He shaped His Vision for Creation, which took shape through the Logos who served as the immanent yet transcendent architect of creation [“In these last days He has spoken to us in a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He created the world” (Hebrews 1:2)]. The highest objective of this particular aspiration of His heart that He envisioned when He created each of us was not primarily for the sake of bringing glory to Himself, but chiefly for the sake of the realization of the God-relationship, between Father and child. Our Father is love, and this must be thoroughly taken into consideration as we address His Vision for human existence, as each member of human existence is the beloved in relation to his or her Creator. Each of us, individually and collectively, is the joy set before Him while He carried out the act of creation.
Because of this aspiration of His, our Creator shaped each of our uniquely distinctive identities with the intention that we would participate in a personal relationship with Him, both on a corporate level and on an intimately individual level. Thus, each of our trueselves is a theological self, because the criterion and middle term of each of our molds of self-actualization are theocentrically designed. This is to say that we become who we were meant to be only when the Creator’s Vision illuminates our existence, both in regards to our state of existing corresponding with His holiness and in regards to the effects of our existence in their sum total being authored by His will. So we only reach self-actualization when His Vision becomes for us the meaning of our lives. Furthermore, every other relation and effect of our existence must have as its defining prerogative the Creator’s standard of oughtness and it must be done consciously before Him. We make Him proud when we strive for this goal, like a child who makes his father proud of his accomplishments. God wrote eternity on each of our hearts, because each of us as individuals and as a collective of brothers and sisters, were meant to flourish in the God-relationship that would blossom endlessly with our Father. If our relationship with our Creator was not originally intended to last forever and ever, then the Creator would not long to be our Heavenly Father, because such a longing as this would be eternal, since He is an infinite entity and in Him there is no variation. Furthermore, since we are His beloved, the love that He has for us is an absolute love without change. His will concerning us is that the highest good possible would be our inheritance as His most beloved creation. This highest good is to have a never-ending relationship with our Heavenly Father, and this necessitates that we be originally endowed to possess eternal life whereby we would never cease to have a vital existence.
Now, this eternal God-relationship on the individual level is more intimate because it is more a matter of inwardness than an outward relationship with the collective, as it is a relationship pertaining to the category of the single-individual, between a self and the author of the self. Remember, our Creator did not design us as one mass. He shaped each of us, individually and with equal thoughtfulness. His designs for us were to be magnificent and beautiful. That is the way it was meant to be. The God-relationship on the corporate level is also no less important, because we are all created to be His children and are meant to be a unified and harmonious whole, but it is with each of us personally that He wants to not only commune with but to abide in. This internal dwelling of God is carried out through the immanency of the Holy Spirit. Only through this internal dwelling of the Holy Spirit is human existence corporately able to become truly unified on an internal level, so it is only through being one with the Holy Spirit individually that we altogether become one as a body is one. For this is no Eastern religious conception of oneness being conditional on the extinction of individual distinctiveness through assimilation, for distinctiveness and individual identity is not only maintained through this harmonization but it is enhanced through multifaceted complementation that is similar to that of each part of the physical body in relation to the oneness of the whole.
this is truth
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